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Gender Gaps and Family Leaves in Latin America

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Abstract

Gender equality in the labor market remains a difficult challenge in Latin America and recent literature shows that child penalties play an important role in explaining these gaps. While policies to address gaps related to parenthood were introduced in recent decades, evidence of its effects is still scarce. This paper presents comparable evidence on the adoption of family leaves legislation in 15 Latin American countries and discusses its relationship with the evolution of the gender gaps in the labor market and the prevailing gender norms. We document that from 2000 to 2019 almost all countries increased the weeks covered by maternity, paternity, or parental leaves. Following a similar approach to that of Olivetti and Petrongolo (2017), we exploit the variations over time and control for country and year-fixed effects to study the relationship between the extension of family leaves and women’s outcomes. We find that these policies are successful in increasing female employment and reducing employment gaps in countries departing from a worse situation in terms of leave coverage or with more traditional perceptions of gender roles. On the other hand, for countries with more egalitarian gender perceptions, our results suggest that the extension of family leaves contributes to reduce the income gaps.

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Notes

  1. Latin America experienced the largest decline in gender employment gaps in the last three decades, yet the female labor force participation is still 9 pp below the average of Europe and Central Asia (ILO, 2019)

  2. While only 44% of low-income countries guarantee at least 14 weeks of maternity leave, this gauge reaches 75% for high income countries (Galván et al., 2021).

  3. All labor indicators are harmonized and measured in the same way for all countries by CEDLAS (2011).

  4. People who are formally employed and are currently making use of family leaves are classified as employed.

  5. See Inglehart et al. (2020) for more details on WVS data.

  6. All the regressions assign the same weight for each country.

  7. The use of a quadratic specification is based on previous evidence, which suggests that the relationship between parental leave policies and various outcomes is not linear but rather quadratic. Moreover, based on correlations analysis we find a quadratic relationship between family leaves and female employment for countries with limited initial coverage of the policy.

  8. Preschool attendance is defined as the ratio between total preschool matriculation and total population among 3 and 5 years old. This information was taken from ECLAC statistics.

  9. Some examples of countries that have introduced daddy-quotas are Island, Norway and Sweden (3 months). Also, countries such as Austria have implemented extended parental leaves if the usage is shared between father and mother. Those countries have been more efficient in achieving a greater share of parental leave between fathers and mothers (Salvador, 2013).

  10. In countries where parents can choose who is entitled for the benefit, usually only few fathers make use of it. That is the case of Uruguay where fathers represented only 2% of parental leave beneficiaries in 2018.

  11. OECD leave policies information based on OECD Family Database.

  12. Correlations are statistically significant only for the most recent period. Estimations available upon request.

  13. Similar patterns are evidenced for men, who decreased informality rates from 53.7% to 50.1% in the same

    period. Still in 11 out of 15 countries, female informality rate is higher than that of males.

  14. Employment gender gap is 38.2 among individuals with children between 0 and 5 years old and 24.3 among childless individuals. Income gender gap is 1.39 and 1.23; and female informality rate is 55.1 and 53.3 respectively.

  15. Table A.2 in the Appendix shows that being a mother is always positive and significative related with the probability of agreement with traditional gender norms, after controlling for age.

  16. This is consistent with previous evidence showing the importance of father’s leave-taking (Bacheron, 2021) on labor force participation.

  17. Estimations available upon request.

  18. We further analyze potential heterogeneous results by level of education and find that the positive effect on female employment and the consequently reduction in employment gender gaps are driven mainly for low educated people (Table A.3 in the appendix). This piece of evidence suggests that the outside option of entering the labor market becomes an option for low educated mothers when countries with limited weeks of family leave expand the benefits.

  19. Due to the quadratic form, the effect needs to be evaluated in one particular point. For example, an increase in the extension of family leaves from 13 to 14 weeks implies an increase of the employment rate in one percentage point (β0−2β1 weeks).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Maira Colacce for valuable comments on earlier drafts and to participants in the seminar of the Family Studies Group (UDELAR), the LACEA Conference, the Network on Inequality and Poverty (Uruguay chapter), the congresses of the Argentine Association of Political Economy (AAEP), the Society of Economics of the Household (SEHO), WELAC (LACEA) Workshop on Gender Inequality and the IAFFE 30th Annual Conference for useful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge the GenLAC team for providing us with the data. We also wish to thank the managing editor, Almudena Sevilla, and two anonymous referees for their substantial comments.

Funding

This work was supported by the Comisión Sectorial de Investigación Científica (CSIC) from the Universidad de la República, through the Social Inclusion Program, Grant ID 60.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Economía, Department of Economics, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Estefanía Galván & Cecilia Parada

  2. Department of Economics, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Martina Querejeta

  3. Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre el Desarrollo, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Martina Querejeta & Soledad Salvador

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  1. Estefanía Galván
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data analysis were performed by Estefanía Galván, Martina Querejeta, and Cecilia Parada. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Estefanía Galván and Martina Querejeta and all authors commented on following versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Cecilia Parada.

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Conflict of interest

We declare that the CSIC financed this research partially. However, the CSIC has no participation in any of the steps of this research and never requested to review the results or any other section of the paper. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Appendix

Appendix

Figures 8 and 9; Tables 5–8

Fig. 8
figure 8

Perceptions on gender norms relative to women’s role. Notes: Data refers to the last wave available, which for most of the countries is 2017–2020 except for Uruguay for which we use wave 2010–2014, and for individuals aged between 25 and 64 years old. Data drawn from World Value Survey

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Fig. 9
figure 9

Perceptions on gender norms relative to women’s role by education level. Notes: Data refers to the last wave available: 2017–2020 and for individuals aged between 25 and 64 years old. Source: World Value Survey

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Table 5 Family leave benefits: implementation date, level of coverage and caps
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Table 6 Effects of Leave Policies on Women’s Outcomes
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Table 7 Heterogeneous Results of Leave Policies on female employment and employment gender gap by level of education, years 2000–2019
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Table 8 Effects of leave policies on women’s outcomes and estimated differential
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Galván, E., Parada, C., Querejeta, M. et al. Gender Gaps and Family Leaves in Latin America. Rev Econ Household 22, 387–414 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-023-09671-9

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